No S**t Sherlock campaign wins award

You might remember earlier this year when I launched the council’s ‘No S**T Sherlock’ dog fouling campaign.

Yesterday, our campaign received a national award for Best Piece of Creative Communications.

The judges of the Comms2Point0 Unawards called it a “gutsy and creative decision to apply an approach that doesn’t fit naturally with a local government department” and that we’d shown “great determination to win over sceptics and fantastic results”.

It’s great for us to be recognised for doing something a bit different, a bit brave and with a sense of humour.

One of the “Sherlock” posters you can see in the towns and parks of Sandwell

We’re absolutely sick of dog owners in Sandwell who don’t pick up after their pets, and the campaign is meant to really make people sit up and take notice.

It worked – the posters went viral on social media (a conservative estimate is we reached over 1 million people worldwide on Facebook and Twitter).

We’ve seen really big increases in the number of people reporting dog fouling (the figures almost doubled in the month we launched the campaign) plus we now have more people reporting owners not cleaning up after their dogs.

We’ve issued more than 65 fines since February for dog fouling, and we’ve successfully prosecuted four people who didn’t clean up after their pet and refused to pay the fine.

We’ve also been rewarding responsible owners by handing out thousands of dog mess bags and arranging for the Dogs Trust to microchip hundreds of pets for free.

We’re keeping up the pressure on irresponsible dog owners with warden patrols, and we’re now using warning stencils on Sandwell’s streets in the spots where we’ve had lots of complaints of dog mess.